For a better login experience

Hello everybody, it seems like I did my homework (aka googling) and now I’ve got something I find really cool. I was not happy with the many flickers I was seeing during the transition between GDM and GNOME. Now I’m hoping Ubuntu guys will soon address that for Jaunty Jackalope ‘cuz Fedora guys have already achieved a great experience for their users, I must say, and we, ubuntu crowd, can’t lag behind! Yes, we can’t!

Ok, in order to get the user’s background color or wallpaper after a successful login attempt in GDM we’ll need a script to be placed into /etc/gdm/PostLogin.

Using root permissions (sudo) and whatever editor you like, create the file /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default containing this script.

Save the file and make it executable using: sudo chmod +x /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default

Backup the file /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default with this command: sudo cp /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default.bak

Now that you already have a backup, edit /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default and remove all the lines starting from:

# Set background color
XSETROOT=`gdmwhich xsetroot`
if [ "x$XSETROOT" != "x" ] ; then

Including these above, until these lines bellow:

“$XSETROOT” -cursor_name left_ptr -solid “$BACKCOLOR”
fi

And leave this line last line untouched:

exit 0

Save the changes you made, log out and log in back again and have fun

The sources for this post are available here and here

Wish you all a merry xmas and a happy new year. And don’t you guys drink too much booze! lol

~ by rmordor on December 26, 2008.